Patricia Jamie Lee

Day Four

Morning Recording Session

“Already this becomes a pattern, Jilly, with you sitting there, and me sipping coffee. Is your talking machine on?”

“On and recording, Grandfather.

“Good, this is good. We are almost there. Let me see, where did I leave off yesterday?”

In all the time I had spent with my father, we had been in the beautiful emerald valley, the sun bright and yellow above us. Now, as Father finished his instructions to me, his form again shifted to the smaller, sinewy form of First Man as we neared the top of the hill. The gray walls I’d first encountered with my Grandfather rose suddenly around us once again. They were the color of slate and threw light back at me. I put my hand flat on its surface and it felt as solid.

First Man smiled. “Don’t worry. It is solid, just not as solid as we once believed.”

I entered through the same arched doorway into the wide hall but, when I turned to speak to First Man, he was gone. He had not followed me in. Fear clutched my middle for an instant but the feeling was quickly removed by that warm presence behind me that father had told me to sink into my belly. Evidently, I had done it right.

I wandered an open, empty space that looked like a large, enclosed courtyard. Uncertain about what to do next, I waited, but not for long.

I felt her presence before she entered. There was a change in the air, a softening of the energy.  It’s hard to describe, but when I turned to see where the change was coming from, I saw First Woman enter from an opening to my right. I think I had expected a female twin to the sinewy First Man but, instead, before me stood the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. She was so beautiful that I felt suddenly oafish, lumpy and adolescent in her presence.

Her features were fine and smooth.  Long hair flowed to her waist and seemed to take the qualities of this place into itself because the color shifted with each step she took. It was dark as the night sky one moment, and a pale red sunrise the next, and then yellow as sunlight a second later. Finally, all color left until her hair looked like a moonbeam.    I must have looked ridiculous, like a boy meeting a movie star. She laughed and I heard bells, crystal bells, tinkling in her laughter. 

“Oh Albert.” She laughed again. “You look dumbstruck.” She ran a hand over her hair as if telling it to settle down, and it muted all color back to deep night.

You would think such a woman would wear flowing white robes but she wore only an ordinary tan cotton shift. No adornment, no rings, no beads, no strands of shell, or headgear or feathers. In truth, she needed nothing added.   I think I was just a little in love-maybe a lot.  Forever after I would seek her in all the women I saw, and would eventually marry the one who had her qualities. I shook myself and blushed. “Sorry. You are First Woman and I am a rude boy. I expected you to be old.”

“I am. I am very, very old.” She grinned. “Come, we have much to talk about and very little time.”

First Woman turned and quickly walked out the way she had entered. I followed. We passed the gray walls and were suddenly standing on the shore of a beautiful turquoise lake surrounded by red canyon walls. Across the lake, twin waterfalls flowed over high ledges and landed in limestone-crusted plates of stone that looked placed by the hand of god. A fine misty spray reached my face from where we stood.

First Woman said, “Pretty, isn’t it? It is my favorite place in all of the realms. Water helps me think.” She walked down the path a hundred yards and sat down on a wide slab of polished wood cut from a giant cottonwood tree. I took a place beside her.

“You are having quite the adventure, Albert.”

“Yes.”

“I am to instruct you about the Weavers, the children who are arriving. Many are already here, actually.”

I had nearly forgotten the words First Man had said, so filled with my father was I still. “Yes, First Man told me.”

The bright look on her face faded as though a cloud had passed overhead. I glanced upward but the sky was a sheet of blue.

“You must listen carefully, Albert. Much de-pends upon these children finding their place in this time. For a thousand years the wind has tumbled the people of earth into one another until they no longer remember where they belong, who they are, or what they have come to do. The longing, the seeking, the deep sense of aloneness and isolation will, for a time yet, cloud all connection with the higher realms, even with the earthly realm. It is a blindness of the soul-you know of what I speak.”

“Yes, I think I do.” I thought again of blind Albert unconscious beneath a grove of cotton-woods.

“It comes rapidly now, this time of change. Soon you must go back but my instructions are very specific and won’t take long, so I want to tell you one small story from my own storyline.” First Woman smiled and the shadow lifted.

Her smile warmed me to the core of my being. I really was in love. She could have talked for one hundred years and I would not have wiggled, so enamored of her was I. Her words were like warm water.

“Before the Wind began, actually it was already blowing, we just didn’t know it, but all the people had a deep belonging with the natural world. We spoke the language and heard the language of earth, stone, animals, dreams, and the soft whispers from the spirit realm. We spoke the language and we listened. It was a natural, graceful way of being. In truth, we couldn’t have survived this cycle without the help of the plants and animals. When the Wind began, it stirred the natural rhythms and disturbed them. It brought with it the beginning energy of separating and, with that, an awareness of what is mine-and what is yours.” First Woman stopped and gazed into my face. “Do you understand?”

I said I wasn’t sure.

“The deep harmonies were disturbed, Albert. Now, instead of living in belonging with all things, we drifted from true belonging into ownership. This belongs to me. That belongs to you. That doesn’t belong. You see?  The energy of belonging shifted.”

I nodded, now understanding her meaning.

“It is impossible to describe how this shift interrupted the natural rhythms, but you can see the result in your world. Now the people of earth fight to have, and not to be. From this place I am now, this high vista, I see the many cycles which form the spiral of which First Man spoke; the energies of gathering, belonging, separating, and alone. Now a new twist of the spiral opens. It will carry human-kind into the next, and even deeper, com-munication between the realms, but it has been very painful, this ending of one cycle and the opening of the new.”

As First Woman spoke, I felt the pain of which she spoke like a knife-point at my throat. I said nothing, just nodded again like a puppet.

“When I was a young girl I, like you, was taken to the this realm, and made a Watcher. It is very difficult to be a Watcher, Albert. You live in one world while simultaneously seeing another. It is confusing, and sometimes very painful. Always you ask why others cannot see what you see. You feel very alone. You see-but are seldom seen by others. Being instructed, as you have been during your time here, helped me, but still I had to live in a world that was rapidly changing.”

She took my hand in hers and continued. “In my village, a neighbor to First Man’s village, I was a maiden of the Sun. I took the Sun as my master. Another man, a priest in my village, fell into the Wind and took darkness into his soul. I tell you this not as an indulgence, but to let you know that in that time, the seed of this time was also planted. I fled my village with another Watcher from the south. I had twin babies in my womb. The evil priest believed himself to be the father of those babes, a boy and a girl but, in truth, they were special children formed from the mating of the Sun and the Moon.”

First Woman gave another tinkling laugh. “Never mind about the logistics of that mating. It simply was. There were others born to the Watchers at that same time around the world, and it is these special children who have seeded the human race with what is needed as the new spiral begins. The descendents of all of those children are like a silver net holding the potential for this new time, when the Wind is ending. I’ll try to explain in more modern terms. The energy of sun and moon combined in these children and created a new chamber in the brain.” First Woman tapped her forehead between her brows. “Here. This chamber is not unlike its predecessor, it is the place of connection, of gathering, but in these descendents of sun and moon, it carries an even greater potential, a preparation for the new spiral of gathering and belonging. A wider reach, so to speak.”

First Woman was excited about this mysterious chamber of which she spoke. Her eyes were wide and shining. I could not take the time to think through all she said because I simply needed to record her words in my mind so I wouldn’t forget.

“Oh, Albert. The potential is so great, so far- reaching and full of promise, and yet so fragile at the same time, but it is container only.  It is like having a miraculous machine, but it must first be turned on. If properly turned on, the human race will flourish once again and surpass its former state of being. The sense of belonging will reach far, far beyond the skin of a single person. Do you understand?”

“I think so.” In truth, I didn’t understand yet, but her excitement was so contagious that I was caught it its glow.

“The Wind of a Thousand Years will not have been in vain for it will herald in such a time of peace, of connection, of light. I want that for the next generation, and all the generations to follow.”

Her eyes misted over and pale particles of light and energy rose up from her shining hair again and formed a halo around her head. I was reminded of the sweet images of the Virgin Mary that I had so loved as a child. In fact, this woman was not unlike my image of that other woman. Such a vision she held for the human race and, with her help, I saw the promise of it too. Her vision of humanity bloomed in my own mind, although it was not the world I currently knew.

She watched my face, her gaze tender and sweet. “You see it?”

“I do.”

“Good. Then my story has carried what it needed to carry to you.” She leaned over and kissed my brow in the same place she had tapped her own brow. “Now sink it, Albert. Sink that vision into your middle.”

She sounded like my father and I laughed. With that most tender of kisses, First Woman became all business again. She ran quickly through my instructions on what she called ‘Care of the container for Weavers.’ She began by reminding me that we cannot know which children are descendents of the sun and moon energies and so therefore, the instructions apply to all children. “As it should be,” she said. She did say that we will in some ways be able to recognize the Weavers because they will enter the world greedy, restless for knowledge, impatient to learn-and intolerant when that learning is denied or constrained.

First Woman then spent a long time talking to me about how, in this new time, we must be mindful of the larger container of earth, that the Weavers must have pure water, pure air, the food supply restored and cared for, and that the ability of these children to weave will depend upon their own brain’s ability to weave its fine connections. “Caring for the weaving child requires a larger spiral of care,” she said, “Which includes care of the mother, care for the family, and care of the earth.”

Remember that the man receiving these rapid instructions was a crazy, young man who had not even considered fatherhood as an option yet. I think that First Woman must have poured the information like liquid into my own container.    I took it in whole, in one long, thirsty drink and have never forgotten the simple instructions she gave.   

However, in the world that unfolded as I grew and aged, following her instructions was another matter entirely. From what I could see, in the final decades of apathy and despair left in the wake of the mighty Wind, our institutions and culture did exactly the opposite of what she instructed. It was remarkable.

But I also saw that these children with the golden chambers, the special containers, would not be denied the learning or the care required.

“A break, Jilly? I begin to stray from my story.”

 ”Yes, Grandfather.”

Albert’s Notes

Jilly looked reluctant to push the stop button on her recorder, but smiled and clicked it off. Oh, I knew she was one of them, one of the Weavers. I haven’t yet said a word about the others, the ones not descended from this ancient line, born of sun and moon, the ones whose containers, for whatever reason, were not filled with this potential.

First Woman called them ‘The Weepers’. Sadly, those who could not pass through the final days of the Wind, she said, would cry all their lives for what they could not have, be, or do. They would die having never thrown off the gray net of despair. I will make no further mention of this hereafter. You will know them when you meet them, the Weepers. They cry and they cry. First Woman also told me to remember that eventually all will cross the stream again and be descendents of sun and moon.

For many years I wondered about this use of words beginning with a ‘W’ in this language of the other realms, and the new spiral. The only thing I saw is that it is the only letter in the English alphabet whose two thin arms reach for heaven, for the higher realms, while its bottom is firmly planted on the earth. ‘W’.  Firmly seated-but reaching.

The telling of this story, so long held, is both energizing and making me weary to the bone. I’m embarrassed to say I sent Jilly off to do useless errands so I could be alone in my home for a moment.

The meeting with First Woman shaped the rest of my life. I became an artist so I could capture her in oil or watercolor. I took up photography to chase her shadow on film. I wrote to feel her hand cover mine over the pen. I married my wife because she reminded me of First Woman. She was a good wife to me, too, and soon, I will find her again.

I think it is time for a rest.

I am an old man. After the last session I crabbed back into my room and stretched out on the bed for nearly an hour until Jilly returned and came back to see that I was all right. I didn’t tell her that it is only there, in my dreams, that I see First Woman. She is always there, whenever I seek her guidance. Refreshed from my nap, I told Jilly that we would do one more session after lunch. It is time to finish this story now.